Web, Photography & Digital Art
My photo of another interesting graffiti on a Venice street wall
‘La patria sarà quando tutti saremo stranieri‘
literally:
‘There’ll be a homeland only when we’re all foreigners.‘
A paradox that overturns the traditional idea of homeland: not an identity that excludes, but a condition that includes.
Only when no one is “at home” can we all feel at home.
Is it utopia, or simply a definition still ahead of its time?
My photo of a whimsical graffiti on a Venice street wall
‘Non c’e più nessun Virgilio a guidarci nell’Inferno‘
literally translated:
‘There’s no more Virgil left to guide us through Hell‘
We’re lost in the dark, and this time there’s no teacher, no poet to show us the way.
Maybe we burned our Virgils, or maybe we just stopped listening.
preamble: a professional photographer asked me some hints to sell stock images. I answered her privately. Then I thought that a slightly fleshed-up version of it might also deserve a little corner on my blog.
For decades now I’ve been looking for some magic formula to sell good pictures on the web, and if I had run into an effective one I wouldn’t hesitate to pass it to you. But, alas, that seems fated to stay a dream.
Then let’s put aside the dreams and face today’s reality, so that we can realistically adjust our targets and methods to it, thus sparing us the worst disappointments:
1 – nowadays (and for quite some time) just everyone is a photographer – or believes firmly that she or he is one, even if all they do is tap the screen and upload the picture. What they lack in skills is amply offset by the hi-tech electronics inside the chatter can.
2 – most of the audience – the buying audience – don’t appear very interested in the quality of the images they purchase. I sold at a comparatively high price and/or in impressive quantities pictures that, if not totally dull, were nothing exceptional, whereas a number of really beautiful ones are still there awaiting their first buyer.
An example?
This image is one of my bestsellers at Adobe with 280 sales until now (from .38 to 26.40 USD each) and keep selling. I am the first to admit that it is nothing special, even if the composition and the content is good.
3 – There seems to be no rationale for the criteria they use to choose which images to purchase – or if there’s one I failed to see it in the last 16 years.
4 – Whoever buys the images prefers the big agencies over the small individual seller, no matter the price, the quality or the professionalism of the agency, as long as it has a name big enough. Possibly (just a wild guess of mine) for they pay out of their client’s pocket, not of their own.
And still, despite such a bleak scenario, I keep making decent money by selling images on the web. How?
In the first place I put in the freezer my ambition to make money by selling art: for my most beautiful pictures I have a couple of private websites that produce a few sales and a lot of satisfaction.
Then I discarded the smallest agencies. Why? Let me explain: I think that Dreamstime is a quite fair agency, but it takes me 2 years to make the same amount I achieve in less than a week by Adobe. Moreover, I would be competing against myself.
Actually I’m selling pretty well at Alamy (the best for me), Adobe and Istock. I obviously discarded Shutterstock, leaving there (in my still open account) only a toilet paper still life.
As for the small agencies, I deleted most of my images there but left my account open: should the situation change I might reconsider coming back again. Except for the ones I really dislike: by them I deleted everything and disappeared in a puff of smoke (a name? Wirestock).
With this tactical approach I saw my income soar… well not enormously but significantly.
And I began listening to the old saying “when you go fishing put a worm on the hook: it’s the fish that must like it, not you” and uploading to the agencies mostly nice but quite ordinary pictures, the kind ordinary people would like and buy.
I hope this helps you rather than discourage you…
This is my first attempt to make video with AI.
WOW! I tested RUNWAY (for now just the free version), starting on some Midjourney images of mine and doing my best to add some simple movement. Just for fun (the last famous words… 🙂 ).
The results look pretty promising, – at least to me – although the free version doesn’t allow movies longer than a few seconds.
Here I used this image 
and a quite generic prompt “(scuba floating gently away under water with fishes)”.
And here… voilà Charon’s boat stuck in a hellish cave while the souls of the dead are waiting…
It was quite cool to recreate with Midjourney a Krampus night 🙂
It’s a big hairy creature, a blend of beast and human, with horns, a long pointed tongue, fangs, and a very convincing devilish look. The roots of the tradition date to an unspecified pre-christian era, from the European alpine regions.
Several centuries back the heathen Krampus folklore was engulfed into the Christmas tradition as a dark counterpart to St. Nicholas, to remind (mostly the children, but not only) of the possible effects of being naughty rather than nice.
Dozens of such ominous half-goat, half-demon creatures roam the streets during the Christmas season (5th-6th December) rattling chains and bells to warn or punish those who haven’t behaved properly (actually all the bystanders, not a bad assumption 😉 ).
The Krampus parade annual event is really a spine-chilling and oddly fascinating show: it takes more than a while to realize that inside those sinister figures there are playful men that every now and then stop and take off their demonic horned heads to drink a beer or play with absolutely delighted children.
Have a look at my AI & I collection and enjoy the gothic artistic side of the Krampus depicted by flogging MidJourney long enough.
13 beautifully suggestive images – occasionally with a hint of humor,
If you want to have a look at the real side of the ‘Krampusses’ – to balance the macabre with the fun – just look at my editorial images of the “backstage” of the annual Krampus Run in Munich These are 100% real, live, no AI involved.
The participants take their Krampus get-ups very seriously and spend a lot of money throughout the year to bring the evilness of their creation to perfection: elaborated barbaric fur outfits, heavy artistically carved wooden masks, monstrous horns, long lolling tongues – and more, much more. It’s a great experience to watch those big friendly guys happy even if exhausted by the fatigue of wearing those incredibly heavy costumes, graciously posing for a selfie and accepting kindly the curiosity of the viewers.
As in so many other occurrences, here too the AI complements admirably a professionally used camera, the one siding with fiction, the other with reality. The conflict is so often in the eye of the beholder…
Visual Journey, embracing Flexibility and Strength in the Golden Years
A new collection at Gameover’s Atelier exploring per images the benefits of physical activity for seniors:
Improved Flexibility
Enhanced Strength & Muscle Tone
Better Posture & Balance
Increased Bone Density
Boost in Cognitive Functions
Portraits created using advanced artificial intelligence algorithms privately generated, intensively post-processed by (human 😉 ) hand and upscaled without losing resolution.
Behold the exquisite allure of Flamenco dance captured through a collection of eight splendid images, now proudly included in my AI & I collection as a result of an effective collaboration between Midjourney 5.1 and me.
I found it quite challenging to pass on to Midjourney the vision I had in mind, but the outcomes were mesmerizing.
Then I devoted myself to a long and painstaking postprocessing to summon the enchantment, the frantic dynamics and the atmosphere that would permeate each and every image.
So pleased was I that I ask chatGPT for a poetic praise of the Flamenco the way Garcia Lorca would have written it. I liked it a lot 😀
En la tierra andaluza,
se escucha el sonido
del taconeo ardiente,
del zapateo encendido.
Es el baile flamenco,
la pasión hecha arte,
la emoción en movimiento,
el corazón que late.
Con vestidos de colores,
y mantones al viento,
las mujeres bailan,
con gracia y sentimiento.
Los hombres tocan la guitarra,
con maestría y pasión,
creando música que alienta,
la danza de corazón.
Y en el aire se siente,
el duende que hace vibrar,
esa danza que es poesía,
y que hace el alma soñar.
¡Olé! El flamenco es vida,
es el alma de España,
es el fuego que nos quema,
y la pasión que nos llama.
(Federico Garcia GPT 😀 )
Yes, I’ll admit that I felt a cold chill down my spine.
I’m pretty familiar with the ways of neural networks and as such I’m well aware that these portraits don’t depict any real person. No, they are artificially generated after processing zillions of human pictures to build up millions of ‘concepts’ about the way a human face should possibly look, and then by combining those concepts into always different images of non-existent people apparently having an own marked identity and personality.
But something within me wouldn’t listen to reason: they looked so incredibly real… thus in order to stifle once and for all that nasty inner voice I fed google with a number of them and asked it to look for similar ones online.
And… no match, nothing, zilch: those people simply don’t exist and never did. Period.
Which leads to a reflection:
according to the naysayers using an AI to generate images would infringe someone’s copyright, and using those images would be “stealing” other people’s work.
Yet applying such gut feeling… opps, ‘reasoning’ to those AI-generated human portraits doesn’t look terribly realistic: there’s no style to be stolen (not to mention that a style cannot be copyrighted), and no one could ever claim that their facial features have been used without their consent. Who’s rights are being infringed?
I agree, it’s understandable that lifestyle photographers and models may fear for the continuity of their job, not unlike the draftsmen when the first Autocad was released decades ago; but the disappearance of the drafting board didn’t kill their profession, it just moved it one notch up. For professionals flexible enough the new tools won’t be the gibbet’s trapdoor, they’ll be a door open on plenty of new unexplored ways to express their creativity.
It should also be remembered (for those who forgot it) that getting decent AI-generated images is not just a matter of snapping fingers or pushing a button, in the same way as taking a decent photograph is not just a matter of tapping the smartphone and uploading the pic to Shutterstock
Issuing the right prompt entails more than a pinch of ingenuity, experience and creativity, and getting the image the way you like needs a good deal of patient experimentation and very accurate postprocessing, just like a real photograph.
Speaking of postprocessing, let me tell you about a curious aspect of it: it isn’t just a matter of conferring a particular flair, light and atmosphere to the AI-generated images. While inspecting my images at 100% after upscaling, I was disappointed noticing that they looked like illustrations rather than as real pictures. To fix that I had to contrive a not-so-simple Photoshop action that took good care of the inconvenience, and now I’m satisfied.
Hope you’ll like my AI & I “portraits”.
I went for spontaneity and simplicity, no extreme fashion or makeup, just people like you and me and the ones we see while shopping.
Oh, I nearly fell desperately in love with the gentleman with silver beard and hair (in the lower right corner of the collage above). I took a dozen AI-snapshots of him, selected the best ones for you and kept the rest to myself. My husband is getting a little jealous and I think he’s growing a beard… 😉
The new alpha Version of Midjourney V5 has been released.
No more distorted faces, no stray eyes, and even the finger count seems to be OK – about time!
How can you tell that this (above) isn’t a real photo? Well, there’s no “Vespa” logo on the young lady’s scooter… 🙂
Such an astonishing perfection is almost disturbing and might pose some ethical problems – working on a blog article about them.
Occasionally though the perfection is, ahem… perfectible: here the photographic effect is also impressive, but the detective doesn’t seem to be much at ease with that gun. Maybe he’s a rookie… 😀
However his hat is very fiftyish and the car in the background is terribly realistic too.
previous parts:
A very brief history of art: In the beginning…
A very brief history of art: growing up
A very brief history of art: today
A very brief history of art: fight them or join them?
Thus we’ll better cross off those ‘predictables’ that live on borrowed thoughts: to them it would make no difference whether a work is human- or AI-generated, and obviously decent AI works will sell cheaper than their human counterparts.
If we want something an AI can’t beat we should look for clients with a non-atrophic soul, a respectable culture and an independent mind of their own; comparatively rare as they can be, the humankind is still huge enough for them to constitute a respectable share of the market – anyway enough to support the real artists, if maybe not all those who tap the cellphone, upload the pic to Shutterstock and call it art.
Reaching such choosy, finicky, appreciative clients won’t be easy, and doing it alone looks pretty hopeless – the starving artist who tries to sell his great paintings on the sidewalk is a classic figure we’d rather avoid.
But the world hasn’t changed only for the worst: today we have an internet where many non-starving artists may join to offer their works to customers able to appreciate them. Or the same literate customers could gather and form a sort of very choosy ‘real art agency’ where only original, beautiful, unique works are accepted.
With a bit of luck there would be also some space left for the tap&upload ‘artists’: in order to supply the brave new microstock world the various AI’s will need to be fed with more and more new images, regardless of their quality.
OK, but…
… what if a particularly clever AI eventually manages to emulate a ‘soul’ of its own that a human cannot tell from a real one? Including attitudes, emotions and moods such as sadness, irony, anger, happiness, humor, enthusiasm, sarcasm and the like, in order to add a final touch of realism?
That would be an extended version of the famous Turing test, a philosophic minefield: if a machine succeeds convincing you (human) that you’re talking to another human being, then you should call it intelligent to all effects, like it or not.
You cannot pretend to play violin convincingly without mastering the art, right?
It’s pretty hard to swallow that much but, no matter how we may feel inside for reasons we ourselves cannot fathom, political correctness would demand that if an AI passes such a test we call it a human being: if we deserve equal treatment, respect and dignity regardless of our color, sex, origin, creed, mother tongue, intelligence, sexual orientation, shoe size and political affiliation, why should it matter if one is made of silicon chips and plastic rather than of flesh and bones?
